EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) stores research data and compressed data of less than 1MB up to 100GB in size, with a current dataset of approximately 50PB. Backup and long-term archiving data is written to tape. The previous in-house solution wrote the data from object storage to a disk file system and then to tape media. However, this approach did not provide sufficient performance for the growing data volumes. Moreover only 90% of the tape’s capacity was utilized. With the introduction of PoINT Archival Gateway, the research institute now has a high-performance and cost-effective solution to write data directly to tape via the standardized S3 interface and to cope with the data growth.
"We are very satisfied with the deployment of PoINT Archival Gateway and especially with the cooperation and exchange with PoINT and the partner Mercia. We feel well prepared for the future data growth and look forward to follow the further development steps of PoINT Archival Gateway."
- Marc Riera (Software Development and Operations – Service and Data Management Technical Coordinator at EMBL-EBI
Challenge
- Backup and long-term archiving of object data on tape
- Scalability for constantly growing data stocks
- High performance and capacity requirements
Solution - PoINT Archival Gateway
- Standardized S3 interface instead of S3 Glacier commands
- Native tape integration
- Node-based software solution for high scalability and flexibility
Benefits
- Cost efficiency through economical use of hardware
- High-performance and flexible storage solution for backup and archiving
- S3 data stream without hard disk buffer directly to tape
- Hardware and vendor independent